The Joy of Reading One Poem in Many Different Translations

New York Times

11-06-2025

One of my favorite pages on the internet contains eight back-to-back translations of 'Au Lecteur,' the first poem in Charles Baudelaire's 'Les Fleurs du Mal,' all in English. I have visited this page many times to compare the different versions of the last stanza. Initially, I was shocked that each rendition of the last line ('— Hypocrite lecteur, — mon semblable, — mon frère!') is unique. Most end with the phrase 'my brother,' but 'mon semblable' generates more variation: my fellow, my twin (several times), my likeness, my like, fellowman, my double.
That last interpretation, which I like for its echo of the French word, comes from Robert Lowell's translation. Lowell also makes the choice that most delights me on the page, translating 'C'est l'Ennui!' not as 'He is Ennui!' (William Aggeler) or 'It is boredom!' (Wallace Fowlie) but as, surprise, 'It's BOREDOM.' The caps transpose all that emphatic energy from the exclamation point onto the word itself, a move with the casual flair of genius, yet faithful to the original. I'm not sure the choice would have struck me as much if I hadn't read it next to seven others.
I once heard someone quote the end of Rilke's 'Portrait of My Father as a Young Man,' in Stephen Mitchell's translation ('Oh quickly disappearing photograph/in my more slowly disappearing hand'). I found those lines so moving I was nervous it would show. Years later I read Edward Snow's translation: 'O you swiftly fading daguerreotype/in my more slowly fading hands.' I vastly preferred the Mitchell — much more natural and immediate, and 'fade' seems so weak, in reference to one's body, one's existence, next to 'disappear.'
This liking it less taught me something profound, not just about translations, but about words, and choices, in general. I love this feature of great poetry in other languages, the way it spins out mutations. I love to see how different minds find (hugely or minutely) different solutions to the same set of problems. An array of translations is decision porn.
The Peruvian poet César Vallejo (1892-1938), like Rilke and Baudelaire, attracts many translators, as Margaret Jull Costa notes in the introduction to her new translations, THE ETERNAL DICE: Selected Poems (New Directions, 144 pp., paperback, $16.95). This is because 'translators are naturally, and possibly masochistically,' she writes, 'drawn to the difficult.'
I suspect poetry is always hard to translate, but if Vallejo is especially so, it's because of his linguistic ingenuity, an innovative style that adheres to a complex worldview. When you're reading Vallejo, it may seem the rules of grammar don't obtain, but nor do the laws of physics — the self of his poetry is godlike, outside time, and anything is also its own opposite. These are poems about the constancy of suffering, as in 'I'm Going to Talk About Hope' ('My pain is so deep, that it has neither cause nor absence of cause') and 'The Nine Monsters' ('Never … has health/been more deadly,/nor has migraine extracted so much forehead from the forehead!'). They speak to the death always present in life, the dying of living.
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